Posts in Category "Flex"

A key piece of successful rich internet application (RIA) design is ensuring that the application meets the needs of the end user. User experience design therefore plays a key role in any RIA implementation.

George Neill is a member of Adobe’s Technology and Experience Innovation group. With over 20 years experience as a designer he has an extensive understanding of users’ needs and behaviours, and a deep insight into how that understanding can be applied pragmatically to create innovative experiences that achieve clients’ business objectives.

Every third Wednesday of the month Skillsmatter host the Enterprise RIA User Group (sponsored by Adobe) at their offices in Farringdon. Everyone is welcome and if you have an Interest in Enterprise scale applications then this is for you.

Tomorrows talk (21st October 2009) is being given by Børre Wessel and is entitled “Scaling Flex for enterprise applications”.

Børre Wessel is a Managing Consultant at Lab49. For the past ten years Børre has focused on advanced user interface development and the successful delivery of numerous enterprise systems.

This session will cover how to scale Flex for enterprise applications. Lab49 are engaged on a number of large Flex applications, and this session will cover some of the lessons learned on how to develop large, scalable and high performing applications built on top of the Flash Platform. Presentation will cover topics like Modularisation, Inversion of Control and Developer-Designer workflow.

Some great releases today that I’d encourage everyone interested in application development to try out…The new beta releases for Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and the Flex 4 SDK are live on Adobe Labs.

There are a load of resources to get started with, these are the highlights:

I’ve been a reader of Reg Developer for some time. So it was nice to meet Tim Anderson when I ran a Flex 2 workshop for the Press last month. Tim posted an article today on Flex and Apollo which you can read in full here.

The subtitle is "Why Flex and Apollo will shake up client application development" which immediately got my attention because I believe they will. In fact I would be as bold as to suggest that they already have. Flash based Rich Internet Applications have steadily grown in popularity for years, and now Flex 2.0 has added a complete toolset for building these applications.

Tim goes on to reference the fact that "Apollo adapts Flex for the creation of desktop as opposed to browser-hosted applications and it promises to be well suited for offline use, providing access to the local file system". He concludes that
"my hunch is that Flex and Apollo will make more impact than previous attempts from Adobe (or Macromedia) at cracking the market for rich internet-connected application", and I believe he is right…

So I hope that folks are familiar with the Labs site at Adobe where most of our latest projects are published.

I wanted to highlight some cool additions for Ajax / Flex developers that were posted this week. The first is AJAX Data Services.

“AJAX Data Services is a JavaScript library that lets AJAX developers access the messaging and data management capabilities of Flex Data Services directly from JavaScript. It lets you use Flex clients and AJAX clients that share data in the same messaging application or distributed data application.”

The second is an update to previously published Flex-Ajax Bridge.

“The Flex AJAX Bridge (FABridge) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser.”

I think this is a hugely powerful way of extending Ajax applications. This makes it really easy to add pub/sub messaging and real-time data push to your applications. I’ll certainly be adding some samples to my demo collection.